1. Technical Field
Embodiments of the present invention relate generally to a method of collecting peer-to-peer (P2P)-based content sending/reception information and, more particularly, to a method that is capable of reliably obtaining content data sending/reception information between users in the provision of a P2P-based distributed content service.
2. Description of the Related Art
A conventional server/client scheme suffers from the burdens of a server maintenance cost, the control of loads and a network cost because a single server or a plurality of servers directly sends content to terminals.
Furthermore, recently, the picture quality of multimedia content has exceeded the Full High-Definition (FHD) level, and has reached up to 4 K. Accordingly, the amounts of content have become very large, and thus have further increased the above-described burdens.
In order to reduce the burdens of content service providers, a P2P-based multimedia service in which content is directly exchanged between user terminals has been applied as an alternative to the conventional server/client scheme.
However, in the case of the current P2P-based content transfer scheme, a common user is not rewarded, although the resources (e.g., computing resources and network resources) of the common user are used. Furthermore, from the viewpoint of a content service provider, it is basically impossible to check the amounts of the content of the content service provider are being provided to respective users.
Accordingly, some P2P service providers collect the amounts of data, sent and received by respective users, from respective terminals. However, in this case, reliability is limited because data is directly transferred by user terminals and there is a possibility that the data may be falsified by users.
Related technologies include U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2009-0037968 entitled “Using Layered Multi-stream Video Coding to Provide Incentives in P2P Live Streaming,” Chinese Patent Application Publication No. 102932460 entitled “Campus Network Peer-To-Peer (P2P) Incentive Method Based on Contribution Values,” and Chinese Patent Application Publication No. 103051645 entitled “Packet-based Incentive Mechanism in P2P (Peer To Peer) Network.”